My art recognizes the human place, the human context - especially in Britain, which is a landscape so worked by people for thousands of years, written, deeply ingrained with the presence of people.

I soon realised that what had happened on a small scale cannot necessarily be repeated on a larger scale. The stones were so big that the amount of heat required was prohibitively expensive and wasteful.

When it does get below freezing and there is - it's cold enough for ice to form, then that changes the whole landscape, and it makes the landscape a different landscape to the one that I worked with previously. And I want to understand that. But the big tension of the ice works is that they're often made when it's cold enough to freeze one piece of ice to another.

I can't edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole. I find nature as a whole disturbing. Nature can be harsh – difficult and brutal, as well as beautiful. You couldn't walk five minutes from here without coming across something that is dead or decaying.

Generally in New York, people just walk over you with no problem about that. Other countries, people want to resuscitate you, like, after a bit.

If you've ever come across a tree that you've lived with for many years and then one day it's blown over, there's incredible shock and violence about that.

When I’m working with materials it’s not just the leaf or the stone, it’s the processes that are behind them that are important. That’s what I’m trying to understand, not a single isolated object but nature as a whole.